NSW Tissue Resource Centre

The NSW Tissue Resource Centre (NSW TRC) collects brain tissues from carefully selected cases with confirmed clinical and pathological diagnoses for use in medical research. The NSW TRC has ethics approval for the collection, storage and distribution of tissue and all cases have next-of-kin consent. The focus of the NSW TRC is neuropsychiatric disorders including alcohol-related brain damage, schizophrenia, as well as normal control tissue.

Brains from people affected with these illnesses are essential for research aimed at developing a better understanding of these diseases and finding treatments and cures. Progress can be made towards finding the cause of neurological and psychiatric conditions if researchers can compare brains from those affected by such conditions with brains from those who were not affected. Normal brain tissue can also be used to study ageing of the human brain. Normal brain tissue is known as 'control' tissue and is extremely important to identify physiological and chemical differences between healthy and disease tissue.

The NSW Brain Banks acknowledges the support of The National Health and Medical Research Council, Schizophrenia Research Institute and the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIH (NIAAA) R24AA012725).